Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (19 page)

Of the five candidate “bridegrooms,” as they were called, only the poorest, Iqbal, zealously showed the devotion and discipline that Samudra required for a martyrdom action against the Western “scum” keen on defiling and destroying Islam. On his Web site istimata.com (martyrdom.com), Samudra expressed the moral outrage felt by many jihadis in justifying suicide bombings:

For all you Christian infidels! If you say this [Bali] killing was barbarous and cruel and happened to “innocent civilians” from your countries, then you should know you do crueler things than that. Do you think 600,000 babies in Iraq [who died as a result of U.S.-led sanctions and bombings, according to Osama Bin Laden in a 1997 interview with CNN reporter Peter Arnett]
²
and half a million Afghan children and their mothers are soldiers and sinful people who should have to endure thousands of tons of your bombs???!! Where are your brains and consciences??!!! The cries of babies and the screams of Muslim women…. We cannot allow unjust and barbarous actions against our Muslim brothers and sisters in any corner of the world.
³

Samudra honored Iqbal with the task of delivering and detonating the large car bomb at the Sari Club, which was always packed with foreign tourists on the weekend but discouraged entry to Indonesians. The other suicide bomber, Feri, brought into the act later, was given a suicide vest and backpack for the nightclub Paddy’s, near the Sari. Paddy’s allowed Indonesians and so merited a lesser measure of carnage.

At 11:07
P.M
. on that Saturday night, Feri blew himself up in the middle of Paddy’s crowded floor. Iqbal, who had only learned to drive a car the day before, waited outside the Sari, as he had been told, until a sizable crowd had ventured out to see what all the commotion was about. The explosion of the chemicals in four plastic filing cabinets crammed into the car could be heard fifteen miles away. In his will, Iqbal said that he hoped his martyrdom would help to restore Kartosoewirjo’s Islamic state. He did not even mention JI. Imam Samudra himself never swore an oath of allegiance to any JI leader, though he had been closely involved with the most violent leadership of JI almost since the time he’d left high school for jihad training in Afghanistan in 1990.

The conventional wisdom has it that the 2002 Bali bombing was an Al Qaeda Central operation franchised out to JI, an affiliated group with a hierarchical command structure modeled after a military organization. In fact, we’ll see that the Bali plot for the most part bypassed JI’s organizational structure. Bali and the other major JI attacks involving suicide bombers were largely planned and executed through local networks of friends (many made in training camps), of kin, neighbors, and schoolmates who radicalized one another until all were eager and able to kill perfect strangers for an abstract cause. Terrorist networks are generally no different than the ordinary kinds of social networks that guide people’s career paths. It’s the terrorist career itself that is most remarkable, not the mostly normal individuals who become terrorists.

DARUL ISLAM AND THE BIRTH OF JEMAAH ISLAMIYAH

Even before independence in 1949, Indonesia’s leaders had faced a daunting task in navigating among the competing interests of strong nationalist, religious, and communist factions to forge a democratic nation encompassing hundreds of ethnic groups spread across thirteen thousand islands stretching more than three thousand miles. During the armed struggle against the Dutch, the Republican forces had to contend with Kartosoewirjo, who after having proclaimed his own Islamic State of Indonesia (Negara Islam Indonesia) in rural West Java, brought into his fold other Islamic rebellions and became the united front’s first Imam. He called his movement Darul Islam, referring to the original Muslim division of the world between the House of Islam (Dar al-Islam) and the House of War (Dar al-Harb). Half a century later, Darul Islam hatched JI.
⁴

In the 1950s, the international stature of Sukarno, who guided Indonesia through its independence and became its first president, rose in the company of fellow leaders of the “Non-Aligned Movement,” Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia. But at home, relations among nationalists, communists, and Muslim groups steadily deteriorated, as competition intensified over whether Indonesia should be an Islamic state or a broadly secular one. In 1959, encouraged by the armed forces, Sukarno replaced a democratic constitution with the authoritarian “guided democracy,” which combined elements more in tune with Nasser’s nationalism and Tito’s communist rule. Three years later, Karto-soewirjo was captured and executed. In late 1965 and early 1966, after a failed coup attempt by leftist army officers associated with the Communist Party, Muslim and nationalist gangs went on an anticommunist rampage, backed and in various regions organized by the army, commanded by General Suharto, who in 1967 forced Sukarno out of power. Hundreds of thousands of people died in what was also an ethnic cleansing of Chinese.

Suharto came in the following years to downplay Indonesia’s nonaligned role and became a staunch U.S. ally. With the communists out of the way, he turned to the task of preventing Muslim groups from sharing power. Muslims felt betrayed, and a considerable body of Muslim opinion remained unrepresented for decades in Suharto’s Indonesia. Surprisingly, however, the government allowed Darul Islam to reassemble, with an eye to using it to get out votes. Despite this compromised aspect of its resurgence, Darul Islam in time attracted a new generation of Islamic militants, including future JI leaders Abdullah Sungkar and Abu Bakr Ba’asyir.

Like Bin Laden, Sungkar and his sidekick, Ba’asyir, descended from Arabs of the Hadramawt region of Yemen, seafarers who over the centuries established a wide network of personal and commercial relationships across southern and southeastern Asia.
⁵
Sungkar and Ba’asyir preached that Muslims—indeed, all mankind—must live only by Islamic law, or Sharia. As a first step toward Islamic rule, the two clerics proposed to set up
jemaah islamiyah,
small Islamic communities that would strictly obey Sharia. In 1971, Sungkar and Ba’asyir established the Al-Mukmin
pesantren,
or religious boarding school, to “nurture both comprehension of, and zeal for, jihad … so that graduates of
pesantren
truly become preachers and mujahedin.”
⁶
The following year, the school moved to the village of Ngruki on the outskirts of the city of Solo, Sungkar’s birthplace in Central Java.

In 1976, Sungkar and Ba’asyir officially joined Darul Islam. Sungkar was appointed “military governor of the Islamic State of Indonesia.” Two years later the pair was arrested for sedition. They were accused of using their organization, Jemaah Islamiyah, in plotting to overthrow the government. They were released from prison three years later but fled to Malaysia in 1985 after Suharto issued a warrant for their re-arrest on charges of sedition.

The fugitives soon began rebuilding their network in exile by asking their
jemaah
in Indonesia to send volunteers who would donate a portion of their salaries. From the outset, Sungkar and Ba’asyir funneled many of the volunteers to Pakistan for military training to fight the communists in Afghanistan, and eventually for jihad in Southeast Asia. Sungkar and Ba’asyir traveled extensively, to the Philippines and Singapore, and on to Pakistan and the Middle East. The contacts they made, especially in Saudi Arabia, bore fruit later, with funds to organize and train JI militants.

In 1985, Sungkar and Ba’asyir began sending volunteers from Indonesia and Malaysia for a three-year training course at Saddah camp in Pakistan near the Khyber Pass, which belonged to the smallest of the Afghan mujahedin groups and was led by Abdul Rasul Sayyaf. From the ranks of these Afghan Alumni would arise the principal network source for the Bali bombing.

The leading players in the Bali plot trained at Saddah: Zulkarnaen, who went on to become JI’s military chief, belonged to the first group, the Class of ‘85; Mukhlas, who became the spiritual guide and overall coordinator of the plot, was part of the Class of ‘86; Hambali, who instigated the plot, belonged to the Class of ‘87. The large Class of ‘90 also included Mukhlas’s neighbor, Mubarok, from the village of Tenggulun in East Java, as well as future Bali bomb-makers Sarjiyo and Dulmatin. Mukhlas’s brother, Ali Imron, and Imam Samudra, the plot’s field commander, belonged to the Class of ‘91. Altogether, ten of the Bali bombing participants trained in Afghanistan.

In 1993, Sungkar officially split off from Darul Islam, accusing rival leaders of Sufism and other forms of “deviance,” which undermined the pure Salafi principles of Islam that supposedly had inspired victory against the Soviets. Sungkar took with him most of the Afghan Alumni he had sponsored. Sungkar called his new organization Jemaah Islamiyah.

JI’s formal structure would be set down on paper three years later in the “General Guidelines of the Struggle of Jemaah Islamiyah”
(Pedoman Umum Perjuangan al-Jamaah al-Islamiyah,
or PUPJI), a manual that contains a constitution, outlines the roles of office bearers, and gives details of how meetings must be organized. The guidelines call for humiliating and terrorizing God’s enemies, destroying the forces opposed to Islamic proselytizing, and clearing the way for martyrdom. The PUPJI declares that anyone who adheres to fundamental Islamic principles and is devoid of corruption, deviation (for example, Sufism), or innovation can take the
bayat
(oath of allegiance) to the emir of JI and become a JI member.

The manual is mostly a translation of the doctrine of al-Gama’a al-Islamiyah (the Egyptian Islamic Group).
⁷
But it also contains elements of Indonesia’s military organization, particularly in regard to the ranking of personnel and responsibility for territory. The PUPJI instructs JI to conduct itself as a “secret organization,” concealing its doctrine, membership, and operations from public view. The PUPJI outlines a clear hierarchical structure. An emir rules atop the JI pyramid in coordination with the Central Leadership Council
(qiyadah markaziyah)
that he appoints. Five advisory councils operate with their Arabic titles under the central leadership:
fatwa
(rulings of Islamic law),
majelis shuro
(council of experts on various issues),
hisbah
(discipline),
mantiqi
(territorial organizations), and
wakalah
(subterritorial organizations within each mantiqi).

Mantiqi 1, initially headed by Hambali, covered most of Malaysia and Singapore and was responsible for finances and economic development. Mantiqi 2 was first directed by Abu Fatih (Abdullah Anshori). Mantiqi 2 covered most of Indonesia and was charged with recruitment and major operations leading to the establishment of an Islamic state in Indonesia. After its establishment in 1997, Mantiqi 3, initially headed by Mustafa (Pranata Yudha) of the Class of ‘86, covered the southern Philippines, the Malaysian state of Sabah and the Indonesian province of East Kalimantan (Borneo), and the island of Sulawesi. The territories of Mantiqi 3 were configured to provide a pipeline for military training and arms supply between Indonesia and the Philippines, which would eventually come under control of Nasir Abas. Mantiqi 4, under the leadership of Abdul Rahim Ayub, covered Australia and West Papua (New Guinea). Mantiqi 4 was the least developed.

POWER SEEPS FROM THE CENTER

Abdullah Sungkar was the central figure and source of vision, inspiration, and direction for the group until he died in November 1999, and his death was a turning point for JI, leaving a leadership void that would never truly be filled. Sungkar’s longtime confidant, Ba’asyir, was expected to lead the organization forward, but Ba’asyir proved to be an inadequate successor. Although a fiery preacher, he was too diffident in operational matters for the likes of Hambali, Zulkarnaen, Mukhlas, Samudra, Azhari, and Noordin Top. And Ba’asyir couldn’t keep them under his control.

Although Hambali is generally credited with leading the radical group responsible for JI’s first wave of high-profile bombings, it was Zulkarnaen, JI’s highly secretive military chief, who initially set the course for this violent turn. When Sungkar returned from exile in Malaysia to Solo, Indonesia, following Suharto’s fall, Zulkarnaen, in June 1999, assembled the Afghan Alumni in Indonesia and lambasted leaders from Mantiqi 2 for their lack of zeal in attacking Christians and other enemies with bombs.
⁸
He instructed one of the future Bali plotters, Amrozi, to prepare explosives for the first attacks on Indonesian soil, against Christians in Ambon. At a meeting on August 14, 2002, he also assigned Amrozi’s older brother, Mukhlas, to be overall coordinator of the Bali bombing. Mukhlas left the operational details to his field commander, Imam Samudra, who had never sworn allegiance to JI and who chose Bali as the target and picked the suicide bombers.

Mukhlas’s importance to the terrorist bombing networks associated with JI also goes far beyond his operational role. He was the spiritual guide of the radical group, and remained so for its post-Bali fragments even from his prison cell on death row. A true believer who saw his role as preordained by God, he noted during his police interrogation:

I left for jihad at the beginning of 1986 and stayed until 1989. What motivated me was that jihad is the utmost form of religious service. After I decided to go, I performed the ritual prayer. In that prayer I dreamt I met with the Prophet (may Allah bless him and give him peace) and he gave me some advice, including an encouragement for me to depart because the journey was following the journey of the prophets.